my favourite laws

My favourite eponymous laws

Zawinski's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.

Tobler's first law of geography: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." Coined by Waldo R. Tobler (b. 1930).

Roemer's law: A hospital bed built is a bed filled.

Rothbard's law: Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.

Segal's law: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

Shirky principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

Sod's law states: "if something can go wrong, it will".

Sowa's law of standards: "Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X."[11]

Streisand effect: Any attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.

Sturgeon's law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985).

Newton's flaming laser sword, also known as Alder's razor: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.

Occam's razor: explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. ("Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.") When two or more explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable. Named after William of Ockham (ca.1285–1349).

Postel's law: Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others. Derived from RFC 761 (Transmission Control Protocol, 1980) in which Jon Postel summarized earlier communications of desired interoperability criteria for the Internet Protocol (cf. IEN 111)[7]

Lewis's law: The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.

Linus's law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Named for Linus Torvalds.

Mooers's law: "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it." An empirical observation made by American computer scientist Calvin Mooers in 1959.

Muphry's law: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The editorial equivalent of Murphy's law, according to John Bangsund.

Murphy's law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." Ascribed to Edward A. Murphy, Jr.

Hanlon's razor is a corollary of Finagle's law, named in allusion to Occam's razor, normally taking the form "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." As with Finagle, possibly not strictly eponymous. Alternatively, "Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence."

Hebb's law: "Neurons that fire together wire together."

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological principle maintaining that the burden of evidence in a debate rests on the claim-maker, and that the opponent can dismiss the claim if this burden is not met: "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Hobson's Choice, a choice of taking what is available or nothing at all (i.e. take it or leave it).

Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" (Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979).

Hutber's law: "Improvement means deterioration." Coined by financial journalist Patrick Hutber.

Kranzberg's laws of technology: The first law states that technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

Finagle's law, related to Murphy's Law, states "Anything that can go wrong, will – at the worst possible time."

Gérson's law: "An advantage should be taken in every situation, regardless of ethics."

Godwin's law, an adage in Internet culture: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Coined by Mike Godwin in 1990.

Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Gresham's law is typically stated as "Bad money drives good money out of circulation", but more accurately "Bad money drives good money out of circulation if their exchange rate is set by law." Coined in 1858 by British economist Henry Dunning Macleod, and named for Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579). The principle had been stated before Gresham by others, including Nicolaus Copernicus.

Grosch's law: the economic value of computation increases with the square root of the increase in speed; that is, to do a calculation 10 times as cheaply you must do it 100 times as fast. Stated by Herb Grosch in 1965.

Gustafson's law (also known as Gustafson–Barsis's law) in computer engineering: any sufficiently large problem can be efficiently parallelized. Coined by John Gustafson in 1988.

Cheops law: "Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget."

Conway's law: Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. Named after Melvin Conway.

Cunningham's law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer. Attributed to Ward Cunningham by Steven McGeady.

Dilbert principle: "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management." Coined by Scott Adams as a variation of the Peter Principle of employee advancement; named after Adams' Dilbert comic strip.

Amara's law states that, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Named after Roy Amara (1925–2007).

The Asimov corollary to Parkinson's law: In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.

Atwood's law: Any software that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.

Benford's law: In any collection of statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.

Benford's law of controversy: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Betteridge's law of headlines: "any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

Blackman’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law: When you are running late, everything takes twice as long. (Jerome S Blackman, MD , 2017)

Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Named after Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini.

Brooks's law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Named after Fred Brooks, author of the well known book on project management The Mythical Man-Month.